Showing a Florida that has disappeared

Historic City News has learned that one of Florida’s major private art collectors, Sam and Robbie Vickers or Jacksonville, have gathered about 2,500 paintings dating to the 1700’s that showcase a Florida that has disappeared.

Their tableau of peonies from 1902 by the artist Felix de Crano is on loan, through March 1st, at the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine.

“De Crano, a French immigrant, set up a St Augustine studio in the 1890’s, around age 50,” Sam Vickers told reporters. “He painted Florida’s marshes, dune scrub, sailboats and stucco houses with tiers of porches.”

This exhibit represents the first major de Crano retrospective, providing a catalog by the historian, Deborah C. Pollack.

Vickers other holdings in the Florida collection also represent longtime Florida residents like the painter Martin Johnson Heade, who died in St. Augustine in 1904, as well as occasional snowbirds like Winslow Homer.

After the artist’s death in 1908, his widow, Mary Gratz de Crano, a Philadelphia real estate and railroad heiress, displayed his canvases and watercolors at his studio for decades; even as they fell out of fashion.

They now sell for as little as a few hundred dollars each.

Similar floral works by his friend Martin Heade, who died in relative obscurity but was rediscovered in the 1940s, can bring six-figure prices.

According to Robert Harper, the Lightner Museum’s executive director, the discrepancy in value between works by two simpatico painters shows the fickleness of the art market.

The Vickers family is now choosing a possible institutional home for their collection. “It definitely has to stay in Florida,” Ms. Vickers said.